Session 13.2

ABSTRACT

Dominant responses to climate risk often emphasise donor-driven adaptation and resilience frameworks while sidelining the deeper structural injustices that make certain communities more vulnerable than others. These top-down strategies, while couched in technical expertise, often obscure the historical and political roots of ecological harm. In Lagos, Nigeria, this oversight is especially visible in Badagry, a coastal town once central to the transatlantic slave trade and today on the frontline of flooding, erosion, and environmental decline. This paper asks: how do colonial histories and contemporary governance failures intersect to shape environmental precarity and constrained mobility in climate-affected coastal communities like Badagry, and what justice-based approaches can address these compounded harms? 

Badagry’s vulnerability is not a recent phenomenon. From the fifteenth century, it functioned as a major slave port through which countless enslaved Africans were taken from West Africa (Sorensen-Gilmour, 1995). The “Point of No Return” and the Slave Attenuation Well are physical reminders of this history, places where bodies were commodified, memories disrupted, and cosmologies fractured (Oyediran, 2017). Today, Badagry remains peripheral in both physical and political terms. Its coastline is eroding under the pressure of unregulated sand mining, while flooding, salinisation, and waste dumping undermine livelihoods (Aliu et al., 2021). One of Lagos’s six unsanitary landfills is located here, destroying mangroves and contaminating fish hatcheries (Croitoru, 2020).

Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative, decolonial approach, combining academic literature with Nigerian and international news reporting, policy documents, and legal instruments, with a focus on sources published between 2018 and 2025. Journalistic accounts serve as critical archives of local struggle, documenting events from the flooding of the Lagos–Badagry Expressway to community resistance against extractive activities. As a Nigerian researcher who grew up in Lagos, I approach the work with embedded knowledge and reflexive awareness, recognising the privilege and responsibility of translating local realities for a global academic audience.

The analysis situates Badagry’s present ecological issues within a historical continuum. The Lagos Government policies envision adaptation but rarely extend benefits to informal or peripheral communities. Adaptation finance is skewed toward wealthier districts, while the burdens of the city’s expansion, from sand extraction to waste disposal, are offloaded onto Badagry’s coast (Rice et al., 2021). This reflects what Sheller (2023) identifies globally as climate colonialism: the reproduction of extractive and racialised hierarchies under the guise of sustainability. The 1951 Refugee Convention excludes climate-related displacement, and Nigeria’s domestic legal framework offers no protection to those affected by slow-onset events such as erosion or salinisation. The absence of legal recognition renders communities like Badagry invisible in protection regimes, reinforcing the structural immobility long embedded by colonial borders and racialised migration controls (Samaddar, 2020).

A decolonial environmental justice lens highlights these intersections, demonstrating that effective adaptation and migration support cannot ignore historical accountability. Drawing on decolonial and justice-based scholarship, the paper offers four actionable recommendations:

1. Legal reform: Integrate climate-induced mobility into Nigeria’s domestic law and advocate for international recognition of slow-onset displacement, linking legal frameworks to measurable protections for vulnerable communities historically affected by structural inequities.

2. Environmental governance: Enforce regulation on extractive activities, including sand mining, and restrict polluting infrastructure in ecologically sensitive areas, with clear monitoring and compliance mechanisms to reduce exposure of high-risk communities.

3. Equitable adaptation finance: Direct funding toward community-led initiatives that protect livelihoods, cultural heritage, and spiritual ties to land, framing these investments as reparative measures with defined outcomes for resilience, adaptation, and mobility.

4. Indigenous knowledge systems: Incorporate local expertise into climate adaptation planning to develop culturally grounded, context-specific strategies.

While focused on Lagos, Badagry’s experience resonates globally, offering lessons for other coastal communities facing layered ecological and social dispossession. By connecting historical accountability, justice-oriented policy, and community-driven strategies, this paper fosters dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and affected populations, supporting the networks, advocacy, and capacity-building that the Climate-driven Migration Symposium seeks to strengthen.

ABSTRACT

In this era of climate crisis, focus has turned to cities as sites of climate action. International networks, most prominently the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, encourage the creation of city-level climate plans. While these networks and participating cities fill a growing role within international discourse on addressing climate change (Bulkeley 2021), little scholarly attention has been given to how city-level plans are created and the processes and actors that drive such work.

I consider the creation and early implementation of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP). Launched in 2022, the MCAP suggests making climate action a routine feature of urban planning, governance, and administration and outlines pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the vulnerability of urban residents to intensifying climate hazards. Impetus for the plan came through state-level politics, and while the MCAP is formally a product of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC, Mumbai’s urban government), the plan was written by the Mumbai office of the World Resources Institute India (WRI). Working as a “knowledge partner” and filling a consulting role, WRI staff addressed capacity gaps within the BMC to create a CAP that would satisfy C40’s requirements. Shortly after the plan’s completion in 2022, the state government unexpectedly changed, removing the political mandate for this work. Following this shift, WRI staff assumed that the plan would be shelved. However, encouraged by positive international attention, growing expectations for cities to be ‘climate ready,’ and local concerns over worsening environmental conditions, urban officials, unfamiliar with the plan and norms of climate planning, asked WRI staff to help advance the MCAP.

WRI staff focused on two governance-focused interventions outlined in the MCAP: creating a Climate Action Cell within the BMC and implementing climate budgeting. While working within an unstable political and bureaucratic environment, these initiatives eventually gained traction and were implemented by mid-2024. The concept of creating the Climate Action Cell was abandoned in favor of significantly expanding the existing Environment Department, making it into the Department of Environment and Climate Change (DoECC) and increasing the number of permanent staff positions from only one to nearly fifty. Beyond coordinating ongoing MCAP implementation efforts, the DoECC was also tasked with overseeing climate budgeting, a C40 best practice. This adds a climate focus to the existing annual budgeting process for the BMC, where the climate impacts of each line of the budget are analyzed. This ideally allows for monitoring MCAP implementation and provides a public-facing accountability mechanism.

This progress exceeds efforts to implement urban climate-focused plans in India, also surpassing the implementation of many C40 plans internationally. In this presentation, I consider the factors that contributed to this unexpected progress. Based on two years of ethnographic research, I outline how WRI staff, positioned at the intersection of the global field of urban climate action and local field of Indian urban governance, acted as brokers between the urban government and C40 and translated C40 best practices into locally amenable implementation steps. Unlike more traditional consultants, WRI staff relied on internal funds for this work and had no financial relationship with the BMC or C40, allowing independence important for their brokerage role (Koster and van Leynseele 2018; Stovel and Shaw 2012). WRI staff worked to gain rapport with urban officials, capitalizing on their status not only as climate experts but also as Mumbaikars familiar with the urban government’s norms. WRI staff focused on incremental reforms to existing practices within the BMC, promoting a process of layered change (Mahoney and Thelen 2009; Streeck and Thelen 2005). I argue that, by layering novel climate practices inspired by global norms atop existing governance structures, WRI staff encouraged the formalization of a climate-focused agenda within an otherwise intransigent governance setting.

While the progress toward this governance-focused implementation is notable, it remains to be seen if this climate-focused agenda, competing with other development objectives in the city, will eventually make climate action a routine part of urban governance in Mumbai. This approach also raises questions over the adequacy of incremental change in this era of climate emergency as well as whether urban governments are the appropriate locus of climate action. However, amidst questions over tradeoffs, coordinated responses to climate threats are needed in cities (Haarstad et al. 2024; Haderer 2023). This case demonstrates possibilities for establishing a foundation to eventually make urban governance more climate sensitive, embedded within a political and bureaucratic environment where change is often difficult.

ABSTRACT

Authors: Mai Nguyen, Khanh-Linh Ta (representative speaker)

Abstract: As climate-related disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods intensify across the United States, domestic climate migration is becoming an urgent reality. The Great Lakes region has emerged as a potential climate haven due to its abundant freshwater resources and relative insulation from extreme weather events. However, effective planning for climate-induced relocation remains hindered by politicised narratives and fragmented policy responses.

This research investigates how the United States, particularly the Great Lakes region, can build stronger state and local capacities to support climate migrants in urban settings. Using a mixed-methods approach, it combines doctrinal analysis of legal texts and policy language from key resettlement efforts in Illinois, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida with empirical insights into the political, social, and economic conditions that shape climate migration narratives. It further draws on international case studies and global debates on mobility-as-adaptation, indigenous land stewardship, and rights-based resettlement to highlight key divergences in how climate migration is conceptualised and operationalised around the world.

At the core of this study is a comparative narrative analysis: how are climate migrants framed in the U.S. discourse, particularly in the Great Lakes region, versus in global forums? While international narratives often emphasise justice, historical responsibility, and collective adaptation, American discourse tends to oscillate between skepticism of the irreversible impact of climate-induced migration and cautious optimism about migration as an economic opportunity. This research interrogates whether the “American way” of building capacity for climate migration via decentralised governance, urban planning, and localised resilience efforts offers a viable or replicable model for other nations.

By analysing the interplay between national policies and global frameworks, this study aims to assess both the limitations and potential of U.S. leadership in climate migration advocacy. Ultimately, it seeks to offer practical insights into how communities, institutions, and governments can collaborate to support inclusive urban resettlement, while recognising the broader geopolitical and discursive tensions shaping climate mobility today.

Keywords: climate change, climate mobility, narratives, Great Lakes, America’s internal migration

ABSTRACT

Authors: Mai Nguyen, Khanh-Linh Ta (representative speaker)

Abstract: As climate-related disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, and floods intensify across the United States, domestic climate migration is becoming an urgent reality. The Great Lakes region has emerged as a potential climate haven due to its abundant freshwater resources and relative insulation from extreme weather events. However, effective planning for climate-induced relocation remains hindered by politicised narratives and fragmented policy responses.

This research investigates how the United States, particularly the Great Lakes region, can build stronger state and local capacities to support climate migrants in urban settings. Using a mixed-methods approach, it combines doctrinal analysis of legal texts and policy language from key resettlement efforts in Illinois, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida with empirical insights into the political, social, and economic conditions that shape climate migration narratives. It further draws on international case studies and global debates on mobility-as-adaptation, indigenous land stewardship, and rights-based resettlement to highlight key divergences in how climate migration is conceptualised and operationalised around the world.

At the core of this study is a comparative narrative analysis: how are climate migrants framed in the U.S. discourse, particularly in the Great Lakes region, versus in global forums? While international narratives often emphasise justice, historical responsibility, and collective adaptation, American discourse tends to oscillate between skepticism of the irreversible impact of climate-induced migration and cautious optimism about migration as an economic opportunity. This research interrogates whether the “American way” of building capacity for climate migration via decentralised governance, urban planning, and localised resilience efforts offers a viable or replicable model for other nations.

By analysing the interplay between national policies and global frameworks, this study aims to assess both the limitations and potential of U.S. leadership in climate migration advocacy. Ultimately, it seeks to offer practical insights into how communities, institutions, and governments can collaborate to support inclusive urban resettlement, while recognising the broader geopolitical and discursive tensions shaping climate mobility today.

Keywords: climate change, climate mobility, narratives, Great Lakes, America’s internal migration